Much has been said in the last few years about big data - the vast reservoirs of numerically-coded transactions and text-expressed consumer opinions, sentiments, product evaluation and the like. Our marketing analytical solutions are focused, primarily, on 1. exploring the wealth of insights hidden in big data, and 2. creating informational synergies by means of amalgamating the otherwise distinct and dissimilar data sources. Our overall goal is to enable a comprehensive assessment of the impact of marketing promotions on the persuasion funnel, as illustrated below:

StructureMeter | Consumer Reviews-Derived Market Structure Mapping

More than a century ago, a noted marketing pioneer, John Wanamaker, famously concluded that half of his advertising was wasted - the trouble, as he saw it, was that he did not know which half. A lot has changed since then and many questions that were unaswerable at that time can now be addressed using valid and reliable means.

Erudite Systems' StructureMeter taps into the wealth of insights contained in consumer forums and other social networks and, leveraging cutting-edge text mining and perceptual mapping techniques, compiles consumer opinion-driven market structure assessments. Given the spontaneous and ongoing character of opinions expressed by consumers in social forums, coupled with the wide-spread - and growing - consumer participation in those open marketplace conversations, StructureMeter's "point-in-time" and "change over time" assessments of market structures are informationally superior to those compiled using traditional methods, such as focus groups or consumer surveys.

StructureMeter-sourced insights translate consumer brand-specific sentiments into multidimensional perceptual maps, with the goal of offering a reliable representation of brands' positioning in relation to key competitors and choice-driving attributes and competitors. The resultant consumer perceptions deliver point-in-time as well as change-over-time assessment.

ChoiceMeter | Extracting Choice-Shaping Attributes

Neuroscientific research suggest that human information processing is quite limited in terms of the number of factors that the human mind can simultaneously consider - the so-called "channel capacity" limits us to actively considering only about seven distinct attributes when evaluating a product or a service. Hence, while choosing among competing brands, consumers are - subcounsciously - compelled to curb the size of their attribute consideration sets, which begs an obvious question: Given the myriad of potential brand descriptors, which ones matter the most?

Our ChoiceMeter methodology taps into a wide range of social forums with the goal of delineating the key determinants of consumer choice that arise out of free-flowing, unsolicited consumer evaluations. The solution retrieves and catalogues product and service category-specific attributes that, as reported by a large cross-section of the marketplace, are the most important determinant of brand choice. Armed with those insights, marketers are able to emphasize the "right" attributes; also, when contemplating new brand extentions, planners can expressly consider attributes that are most meaningful to prospective buyers.

ImpactMeter | Tracking the Impact of Advertising Over Time

Considering that, for many brands, general advertising represents an ongoing investment, the measurement of the efficacy of those promotions - as captured by changes in consumer brand sentiments - should also be ongoing. Our ImpactMeter has been designed with that in mind: Build around the notion of (marketing) action-attributable incrementality estimation, the underlying methodology interprets consumer self-elucidated brand evaluations via longitudinally-standardized set of metrics, allowing for direct comparison of consumer brand perception at different points in time.

Like StructureMeter and ChoiceMeter, ImpactMeter also leverages the rapidly growing, open content of numerous social media networks with the goal of translating the unsolicited, self-reported consumer opinions into valid and reliable estimates of companies' general advertising efforts. When combined with the assessment of other, i.e., "lower funnel", such as direct mail or coupons, promotions,ImpactMeter will prove itself to be an invaluable marketing mix optimization tool.